


Pagliacci

by saintsrow2



Category: Doctor Sleep (2019), Doctor Sleep - Stephen King, IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Dead Eddie Kaspbrak, Grief, M/M, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22538404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsrow2/pseuds/saintsrow2
Summary: They don’t have to use their real names at AA, so when he’s in that room, his name is Pagliacci. When he stands up and says it the first time he gets a few sighs, from people who think he’s choosing something stupid and not taking this seriously, but he is taking it seriously, as seriously as he ever can ever take anything. It’s important to him that he’s here; he wants to do right by his friends.“My name is Pagliacci, and I’m an alcoholic,” he says on the first night. “I’m here for my friends. They really care, God bless ‘em, and as much as I like a drink, I like not making Bill come with me to the hospital while I get my stomach pumped even more. So, I’m here for them.”A year after IT is dead, Richie starts AA. He meets a man with blue eyes who says he can see ghosts.They become friends.
Relationships: Richie Tozier/Danny Torrance
Comments: 34
Kudos: 337





	Pagliacci

They don’t have to use their real names at AA, so when he’s in that room, his name is Pagliacci. When he stands up and says it the first time he gets a few sighs, from people who think he’s choosing something stupid and not taking this seriously, but he _is_ taking it seriously, as seriously as _he_ ever can ever take anything. It’s important to him that he’s here; he wants to do right by his friends. 

“My name is Pagliacci, and I’m an alcoholic,” he says on the first night. “I’m here for my friends. They really care, God bless ‘em, and as much as I like a drink, I like not making Bill come with me to the hospital while I get my stomach pumped even more. So, I’m here for them.”

There’s a smattering of applause, now they’ve cottoned on to the idea that he’s sincere about attending and he sits back down in his chair, not wanting to say more. Not wanting to talk about how long he’s been drinking, or why it started to get out of control, or the things that haunt him at night. He slumps in his chair and turns the silver 24 hour chip over in his hands. There’s a pretty large group of people there, and he’s comfortable being a silent party, listening to others talking about their struggles for the rest of the night. He has no illusions that this is going to cure his problems all in one go.

He notices the man with the brassy hair and the arched eyebrows the first night, staring at him with intensity, but he figures it’s someone who’s _recognised_ who he really is, and avoids the man like the plague all night. Not that the man really bothers him; there is a level of respectful melancholy to the whole meeting that makes his skin itch, but the stranger respects it. If it wasn’t for the fact that Richie knows that his friends will be asking about it, he _would_ say he’d rather pull off his own skin than ever go back.

But his friends love him, and so he’s there again next week. He says little. Anyone who knew him would say this was so unlike him as to be unrecognisable, but he finds it hard to bring himself to talk while he’s there. Then again, it’s been getting harder and harder to crack jokes. There’s not a lot of good chucks left these days. Makes a horrible kind of sense, really; the clown is dead, the circus left town. Now he’s just another talentless white guy with a mouthful of excuses for his horrible behaviour. 

That man is there again. He introduces himself as Danny. Danny has a stare like a knife in the face and can’t stop watching him, eyes sliding back over to him periodically throughout the entire second meeting, as if he’s constantly trying to build up the courage to say something.

It’s fucking annoying.

At the end of the second meeting, he goes up to Danny outside the old hall they meet in, with every intention of nipping this in the bud.

“Hey,” he says. “I don’t know about you, but I didn’t really come to AA to pick up dudes, so could you lay off on the staring?”

“Sorry,” Danny says. “I’m not--”

“A queer? Yeah, don’t worry, it’s not infectious.”

“No, I am a queer. I normally just say bisexual, but that’s not what I was going to tell you.”

Fuck. The embarrassment of the moment is pretty brutal. He withers on the spot, looking away from Danny and staring at his feet, the earlier anger vanishing faster than snow on a hot plate.

“Sorry. I’m being an asshole,” Richie says.

“It’s ok. I’ve been there. It’s hard enough coming to AA, it has to be even harder when you have to worry if the wrong person is going to sell you out to TMZ.” Danny is nice, it turns out. How fucking infuriating of him. “That why you’re here instead of LA? You from New Hampshire originally?”

“Ah, no, Maine. But I didn’t really want to go home, either.”

Danny nods understandingly. “You didn’t speak much this week.”

“Kind of lost my sense of humour.”

“I get that. It helps, though. Having one. But there’s a lot of anger in grief, I know that.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Dan.”

“See you next week, Pagliacci.”

“Oh, come on, you know my real name.”

“No, you said Pagliacci. That’s your name while you’re here.”

_Man walks into a doctor’s office and says he’s miserable all the time. Nothing is bringing him any joy, he can’t see any of the good in the world. Needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning._

He doesn’t talk to Danny at the third meeting, or the fourth. Then all of a sudden he’s being handed another chip, one that says 30 DAYS, and he thinks about the weight of it in his hand and the weight of a silver dollar that you could melt down to make silver bullets to kill werewolves. He doesn’t know if an aluminium medallion will be as effective, but reminds himself what made the silver work was the _belief_. If he believes, maybe the coin will be the greatest weapon he’s ever used. He doubts it, though.

He finds himself paying attention to Danny. Danny is well-liked, he observes. People respect him, and listen to what he has to say. He doesn’t talk about himself very much, but what he does say is eloquent and comes from years of self-reflection. He’s also handsome, but that is neither here nor there. 

The fifth meeting, he asks Richie out for coffee.

“You look like you need someone to talk to,” Danny says. 

“I appreciate it, but I have problems that I don’t think anyone’s gonna really be able to help with,” Richie says. “I’m trying to figure it out on my own.”

“Ok. I get that. But I might be able to help more than you think.”

“No, really, I know I probably sound like some hack celebrity who just doesn’t want to hang out with people who aren’t famous, but I promise you…”

“Pennywise,” Danny says.

Richie holds dead still, like the name might summon IT back to life, or like this is all some awful dream he might suddenly wake up from. He looks at Danny and then around the now empty meeting hall, as if the chair and folding tables might suddenly jump up and start a crazy demonic dance. 

Nothing happens.

“Just meet me tomorrow at the coffee shop in the town centre. We can talk about it,” Danny says.

“Okay,” Richie agrees.

He thinks that maybe Danny is from Derry too, that he maybe grew up close enough to the Losers Club to hear some of the truth. It took away so many of his memories he probably has brain damage, he can completely believe conveniently forgetting that Ben’s cousin Danny was there half the time and heard about it all. The next day he trudges through the snow to the small coffee shop in town and finds Danny is already there, sitting at a table by the window, a cup of coffee ready. Black with two sugars, just how Richie likes it.

“So… What’s going on?” He says, sitting down and shucking off the big wool overcoat that Beverly bought him when he said he was moving out to New Hampshire. She told him it accentuated his shoulders and back just right; he thinks when his hair is all raggedy like this it makes him look like a scarecrow.

“Normally I don’t tell anyone about this. Except for my niece, but she has the… She’s the same as me,” Danny says.

“Jesus fuck, please tell me what you’re about to say is a lot less weird than it sounds right now.”

“It’s weird the same way fighting an interdimensional clown is weird.”

He swallows a mouthful of coffee. Danny has blue eyes, brighter than Richie’s own, and he uses them in a way that feels weaponised. It’s a way of being _seen_ that Richie has been running from his entire life. Somehow, for some reason, he forces himself to stay even when every one of his past selves is telling him to get the fuck out as fast as possible. 

“Tell me about it, stud,” Richie says.

“You come from Derry. Two of your friends died fighting IT. You were in love with one of them,” Danny says.

“That’s about the size of it,” Richie says dryly, as if he’s not emotionally connected to what he’s saying at all. “How the fuck do _you_ know that?”

“I have a gift. It’s called shining. I can… See things, things that have happened in the past.”

“I think that’s called remembering.”

Danny quirks an eyebrow at him and Richie finds himself grinning.

“I can see other things too. Ghosts. The imprints of people on places. I’ve had my run-ins with things that don’t like it, or like it too much.” 

“Uh huh. So, you’re psychic?”

“Yes.”

“Prove it. Tell me something else.”

“You were going to kiss him. Before it happened.”

Richie takes another drink of coffee. The little humour he was finding in the moment has vanished. He shrugs.

“Yeah. I guess so. Why are you telling me about all this?” His voice is snappy, impatient.

“Everyone needs someone to talk to.”

“I have friends, if you remember. I’m doing AA for them.”

“Good for you. You’re not the only one at the table.”

Richie stares at him. He thinks about how precious few people there are in the world who he will ever be able to tell about what he’s been through, and thinks about how Danny must be the same way. 

“Okay,” he says. “We can be freak friends.”

Danny has a nice smile, he discovers.

Richie considers telling the others about Danny, but figures he might keep this to himself for a little while. No real reason, just that he hasn’t decided what he wants to say about it yet. He tells Mike and Bill over dinner about making friends with a ‘sponsor’ and they say approving things. 

_The doctor tells the man, don’t worry, I know just the thing_.

Richie is living in a small apartment in Frazier. He is ostensibly living alone, but he is rarely actually alone for long. The others keep popping up, and he knows why. You find one of your friends unconscious in a puddle of puke barely breathing and rush him to hospital to get his stomach pumped _one time_ and all of a sudden he can’t get five minutes to himself. 

Not that Richie doesn’t appreciate it. They care about him immensely, and he wouldn’t be doing anything with his life if it wasn’t for them. Almost certainly would have hung himself by now, or drunk until his liver exploded, or taken one too many xanax. He’d considered his options.

Bill has gone and come back once already, Mike has been here for a couple of weeks, Ben and Beverly were there to help him move in. They cycle in and out, coming and going as they please. They tell him continuously that he can leave and go stay with them whenever he feels like it, but he doesn’t feel like it. Not right then, anyway. He likes how quiet and boring it is here; getting out of the insane frenzy of LA was good for him, and he doesn’t want to go back to that now, or to Chicago, or on a long road trip. He needs stability, he needs calm. He needs someone to talk to who he doesn’t have thirty years of baggage with.

He’s not been working, that goes without saying. There’s no way he could be on stage right now and say a fucking word, let alone write his own material. Just the idea of it makes him feel borderline hysterical, a stage fright he’s never experienced before suddenly crushing him. He can’t even look at the material for his last show anymore; the words might as well be poisoned. They’re all just lies, as far as he’s concerned. He’s sick of lies.

Maybe that’s why having Danny is nice. He can be honest with Danny.

“A friend died. Out of nowhere,” Richie says to the room, turning the one month chip over and over in his hands. Having something to fiddle with takes the edge off the anxiety. “A few of us met up, like a reunion thing, and then… Wouldn’t you know it… Another friend dies. Freak accident. Good friend. Probably best friend I ever had. And then he was gone, just like that. And I don’t think he ever knew how much I loved him. I’d always been kind of a heavy drinker, but it got out of control really fast. I’d forgotten what a normal amount of drinking was a long time ago, so once I started spiralling… If it wasn’t for my friends, I’d be dead. And they deserve better than that. So, I’m doing this for them.”

He sits back down.

“Thank you for sharing,” Danny says. 

Getting Danny to share is harder. Richie feels like he’s earned some honesty, though. On their second coffee date -- not a real date, he can’t even bring himself to make the joke -- he asks for more of Danny’s story. Danny has been reticent about things so far, other than that his father was an alcoholic, a plight that Richie is painfully, intimately familiar with. Danny dodges most questions with vagueness, but while that flies in AA, it feels unfair, given the circumstances.

“You know all about me,” Richie says.

“I don’t know _all_ about you,” Danny objects.

“The important stuff.”

“You’re more than your personal tragedies.”

“Whatever, Dr Phil. This isn’t a fair balance of power here.”

Danny concedes that that’s true, but he doesn’t say anything right away, just stirs his coffee idly as if there’s anything to be found in the coffee grounds at the bottom. He folds his hands on the table and looks Richie in the eye in a way that always makes him feel cut through.

“When I was a small child my father took up a job working as a janitor at a hotel over the winter. The hotel was completely cut off; it was me, my father, and my mother. No one else for miles around. We were snowed in very quickly. My father was an alcoholic with violent, manipulative tendencies, struggling to write his first novel.”

Richie says nothing. He thinks about Bill’s current unfinished novel, the pages and pages of text he’s been churning through for a year now, never seeming to reach an end. 

“Because of my ability to shine, I attract… Things. Ghosts, spirits, memories. In the Overlook Hotel, they turned bad. And they turned my father bad with them. In that winter, he tried to kill both me and my mother. We were forced to leave him. He froze to death up there, because I trapped him in a maze to escape.”

Richie drinks his coffee. He hates tension, would normally say anything he could to shatter the emotion of the moment. But he doesn’t tell a lot of jokes these days, and Danny told him something horrifying, and he doesn’t know what in the world he could possibly say. He wishes he could have a drink, but that’s not unusual.

“You were a kid,” Richie says.

“Yeah,” Danny says.

Richie thinks about what he was up to as a kid, only a little older than Danny. Running through the sewers, the lives of everyone he loved on the line, knowing he could and would die for his friends. Normal kids’ stuff.

Danny reaches out and touches his hand. It’s gentle. 

“I know it wasn’t my fault,” Danny says. “It wasn’t yours, either.”

Richie wants to pretend he doesn’t know what he means. “Thanks.”

“He loved you too.”

Richie stands up, pulling his hand out of Danny’s grip.

“I have to go,” he says, before he runs out of the shop.

He doesn’t talk to Danny again at the next meeting. Avoids his gaze, keeps to himself at the back of the room. It’s the first week in a while where he finds himself loitering outside a liquor store for a while, before he convinces himself to text Beverly instead, get wrapped up in a mindless conversation about her dog, pull himself away from temptation and go back to his apartment. Bill is still there. Mike has gone, with a promise to return. Richie feels bad for how much he is tying them down. He dislikes being a burden, but selfishly, he also sometimes wants to be alone. Sometimes he wishes they would all stop trying so hard to save him and let him die slowly.

But he knows he would never let any of them do that, so he understands why they won’t let him. He asks Bill how the novel is going.

“It’s going,” Bill says. He scratches his chin. “The funny thing is, this time the ending is the first thing I thought of. But now I don’t know how to get to it.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Richie says. He goes to lie down and remembers what Danny said about needing someone to talk to. 

At the meeting next week, he sits by Danny.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s ok,” Danny says. “It’s not always easy.”

_The doctor tells the man, the circus is in town, go see the great clown Pagliacci._

It isn’t. He used to drink without purpose or decision; it had gone from him having a few drinks a night to him constantly moving the goalposts of when was appropriate, what was appropriate. How much behaviour he could excuse. How much disappointment he could take. Things had spiralled so quickly that year, all because he had taken his mind out of gear and freefallen without allowing himself to think. In that year, nothing mattered and no one cared. He had no concern for his safety and no real idea that anyone else would care. It was effortless the way deep sleep is effortless, nothing but the sweetness of being removed far enough from reality for whatever happened to feel as meaningless as a dream.

In contrast, getting better is _hard_ . It is _work_. Richie has to be careful all the time, and people treat him like he’s an unexploded bomb. They do it out of love but every time someone asks if it’s ok if they get a drink with dinner or their eyes slide to him when alcohol comes up in conversation he feels like he’s standing naked in a public place, too many people staring at him and being disgusted by what they see. Might as well be in the middle of a fucking runway with his paunch and pale flab and hair everywhere, all the things about himself that force him to crack jokes that make everyone else as uncomfortable as he feels. 

Danny gets it. He has been sober for years and tells Richie that it is still work. It gets easier, and a lot of the time he doesn’t think about it at all.

“I don’t count success in how little I think about it,” Danny says as they stroll through the woodland trail in the land behind Frazier. It is reminiscent of the Barrens, but not enough to be worrying. “Or how hard some days are. If I did that, I’d never be happy.”

“How do you measure success then?” Richie says. 

“That there’s another day to count at all.”

Richie doesn’t like that. He doesn’t value his days very much. He kicks a rock into a snowdrift, a futile attempt at physical destruction. 

“What the fuck is the point of that?” He says. “Just living without reason?”

“Why do I need a reason?” Danny says. “It’s my life, not a thesis. I don’t have to argue in favour of it.”

Richie doesn’t like that either. He doesn’t know how to turn off the voices in his head constantly questioning his everything, from why he bothers waking up in the morning, why he was the one who survived, to why he thinks he deserves another cigarette, why he dresses so stupidly, why he would listen to that song right now. There is an enemy in his life ripping into everything he does, constantly ridiculing him and telling him that everyone around him is ridiculing him too, sees through his pathetic attempts to pass as a normal, decent human, and that enemy is himself. 

It was easier when it was just a giant killer clown.

He asks Danny more about himself; it’s easy to believe things about ghosts and telepathy after his own experiences, and more interesting to talk about than the drinking, the depression, or the… Danxiety. Fuck. There goes the rule of threes. 

“I’ve seen some things,” Danny says, cryptically, when Richie asks about the ghosts, the monsters, wondering if anything was like It. 

“Weirder than alien clowns?”

“Oh, I’ve seen a lot of things weirder than you.”

Danny doesn’t make a lot of jokes and it catches Richie off-guard when he does. His smile is almost shy, something he hands out rarely. He _is_ handsome, especially when he smiles. It isn’t a crime to observe that. 

“You’re not funny, has anyone ever told you that?” Richie says.

“You’ll have to teach me.”

“I’m not very funny either. Tell me about your adventures, Scooby Doo.”

“I don’t know if you’d call them adventures. I met a very bad group of people last year. Vampires, you might call them. They fed on people like me, tried to eat the shine. Let them live forever.”

“That is… Crazy.”

“Crazier than the space clown?”

“Definitely as weird. Didn’t think anything would surprise me after that, but there you go.”

Danny gives another one of those rare smiles, apparently becoming more common but not depreciating in value.

“Life always has a way of surprising you,” he says.

Dan tells him about the hospice. He tells Richie that he takes away people’s pain and Richie thinks about it a lot. Those old people, many of them dying alone, if wasn’t for Dan there to hold their hands and will away any last demons that might haunt them. Dan tells Richie he has special boxes in his mind, where he locks away the things that would hurt people, and Richie knows he doesn’t just mean compartmentalising trauma. Dan makes pain go away. 

Richie is in pain. Sometimes he forgets about it, but it is always there, under the surface, waiting to come back. At times he can manage it, and feels strangely proud of himself when he does, when he sees a kid tucking an inhaler back into their pocket and feels himself smile sadly, but the moment will pass and he will continue on. Other times the reminder takes him by surprise; holding a packet of snack cakes and feeling his entire chest clench with sudden, rich agony, unable to do anything but stumble back outside into the snow in a haze. There is no predicting or controlling it, and every time he thinks he’s mastered part of the climb he will turn and see how vast and unforgiving the landscape truly is, and he is already so very tired.

Often the pain makes him sad, but on occasion it makes him angry. He has no preference for either; when he’s sad, he’s too inconsolable to do anything, when he’s angry, he’s destructive and vengeful. He says things he thinks but doesn’t mean, spitting vitriol at Mike and Ben, blaming Bill, picking petty fights with Beverly. They back off when he’s like this but never too far, always make sure he knows they’re there, waiting for him. For some reason this makes the anger worse, the broken part of his brain that makes him want to hurt people as much as he hurts telling him to dig deeper, find the things that there would be no coming back from. The problem is, he could never say the nastiest, darkest things that he can imagine, and the others know him too well to be driven away by snarls that have no bite behind them. It all just coalesces into Richie feeling more of a failure. He is a bad friend.

One day, in the small gaps of time where no one is staying with him and he is alone in his apartment with all the spaces for things belonging to someone who will never see it, Danny comes over. Richie did not want to see anyone, but the silence in his apartment is so deafening. When he opens the door Danny winces at the volume of the TV, the radio, the music playing all at once. He turns them all off, which is fine. Richie doesn’t need them now there’s someone else here.

Danny brought groceries and makes them both dinner, even when Richie says he doesn’t need to. 

“I’d like to,” Danny says, with a smile.

They talk about music, Danny’s niece Abra, concerts they’ve been to, comedies they like, childhood. Danny makes pho. He has started trying to learn how to cook more, with his niece. Richie sees the love Danny has in him; he is a man who is filled with love to give but not enough places to put it. The places he can invest it, he spends heavily. 

They talk about alcohol. 

They talk about grief.

They talk about pain.

The bowl of soup is hot in Richie’s hands and he holds it until he burns his skin. Danny gently pries his fingers off it and Richie flinches from his touch, spilling the broth over the table in an arc. He shouts in annoyance, slapping the bowl with his hand so it flies across the room and smashes against the wall. Danny looks at him and then at the broken bowl before he gets out of his chair to go and clean up.

“Stop it,” Richie says. “Leave it.”

“It’s not a problem,” Danny says.

“It is. It is a fucking problem.” Soup drips off the table edge and onto his leg, scalding through the cotton of his sweatpants. He rakes a hand through his hair. “You take away people’s pain, don’t you?”

Danny picks up the shards of blue porcelain, collecting them in his hand. He doesn’t answer.

“You take away pain,” Richie says, more insistently. 

“Do you have any cloths to clean this up?” Danny says, softly.

“Fuck the soup. If you can take away pain, why can’t you do that for me?” Richie says. “If you can lock away the bad fuckin’ ghosts, why can’t you do that for me?”

Danny stands up and carries the shards of bowl to the trash.

“You don’t have bad ghosts. You just have a lot of grief,” he says.

“I don’t care what it is. I want it to go away. I can’t handle it. I can’t.”

“You can. Look, Pagliacci, I know what it’s--”

“That’s not my fucking name!” Richie is standing now, glaring at Danny, hands curling into fists on the tabletop. “What kind of a fucking friend are you? Why won’t you help me?”

Danny grabs a towel from the counter and goes to clean up the soup from where it is steadily seeping into the wood flooring. 

“I am helping you,” Danny said. 

“No you aren’t. You’re just letting me fucking suffer. It’s bullshit. Why can’t you just take all my fucking memories of him away? Why can’t you just lock them up so I never have to remember him again?” Richie says. 

“I can’t do that. I actually _can’t_ do that, but I wouldn’t even if I could,” Danny says.

“Fuck you.”

Danny tosses the towel across the room back onto the counter.

“You’re a selfish fucking asshole,” Richie says. His voice is poison.“You just want me to go through the same shit you did.”

“You’re going through what you’re going through no matter what,” Danny says. 

“I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t take it.”

_“But doctor,” the man says._

He isn’t standing anymore. He doesn’t know when he made the choice not to be but now he’s on the ground on his knees, hands still gripping onto the table edge but head hanging from his shoulders like the weight of it was so much his back could hardly bear it. Danny, instead of leaving, walks around the table and comes to sit on the floor beside Richie. He puts his arms around Richie and lets Richie fall into him, head on his shoulder, hands clinging to the back of his jacket. Danny is warm and solid and his touch isn’t scalding.

The snow doesn’t thaw for a long time this far north. Richie is still pulling on the thick coat Beverly gave him well through February, grateful for the way snow clings to it but never manages to break the armour that she’s given him against the elements. His friends come to visit and when all four of them are there, he introduces them to Danny. They all go to a restaurant in town and then to Richie’s place to get some ‘drinks’, which are all juices and sodas and things that make Richie crushingly depressed at first before he reminds himself that this isn’t just about him, it’s about Danny, who is never embarrassed or ashamed of his addiction. If people don’t drink at his place for Danny’s sake, he’s fine with that; people going out of their way for him irritates him, but he feels a protective surge when it comes to Danny.

They talk about childhood, Richie, Danny, movies, music, who can play instruments (Bill and Richie, the rest of them say they’ll all play triangle, a piss poor band), pets, work.

IT.

They have never had someone new they can tell about IT. Richie can see the others are oddly _excited_ to; none of them had ever expected that there would be a time when someone would be able to believe and understand the horrific stories that define their lives. There a similar camaraderie in the apartment that night as there is amongst the AA meetings, or amongst veterans, Richie thinks. People who have insight into a suffering that is key to their lives but something most would have no way of really, truly understanding. They can all laugh about it, even, safe in the comfort that everyone there understands each other.

At the end of the night, Richie overhears Bill talking to Danny in the kitchen, when they think no one else can hear.

“Thank you,” Bill says, “for being his friend. I worry about him so much.”

“You don’t have to thank me, it’s not a chore. He’s my friend,” Danny says. “I like him a lot.”

Richie finds there is something warm inside him that he thought went out a long time ago. At the end of the night when Danny leaves, Richie hugs him, and his hand lingers on Danny’s shoulder for a little while. Danny has blue eyes and hair that is golden in light and a smile like the sun hitting a crystal at the right angle, throwing rainbows across the room. 

Richie dreams about Eddie. This is something that happens often, but this one is different. There is no dark and noise, no catastrophe of death and grief and blood. The two of them are standing side by side on the cliff overlooking the quarry. The sun is high in the sky and the waters beneath them are shimmering green, fresh, and beautiful. Eddie is wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and a smile. His hair is messy and his sneakers are scuffed, but there is a sense of absolute calm around him.

“It makes me so angry that I never got to be with you to love you,” Richie says.

“You loved me every time we were together,” Eddie says. “I always knew that. I didn’t _know_ that know that, but… I knew that.”

Richie laughs. It’s strange to laugh in a dream. The sound seems to emanate from the world around him as much as it comes from within.

“I have an apartment. You’ve never been. I don’t think you’ve ever been to New Hampshire. But when I chose it all I could think was ‘would Eddie like this apartment? Would Eddie like this town?’” He says. “‘What would Eddie say about this building? Would he want me to eat out here? Would he want me to go to AA?’”

“It doesn’t matter what I would think,” Eddie says. “Are you happy?”

“No. But I think I could be,” Richie says. 

“Be happy. Be proud,” Eddie says. He is staring off the edge of the cliff into the waters below. It is so beautiful beneath them, so calm, so quiet. “You can still exist inside the pain. In spite of the pain.”

“I miss you so much. I feel like I’ve missed you for my whole life.”

“Of course you do. I was the first love of your life.”

“I think you only get one of those, traditionally.”

“Fuck _tradition_. Do you only love one of your friends? Do you only love one kind of food? Do you only love one place? It’s not lesser, it’s just different. Your whole life has been different. Why try clinging to tradition now?”

Eddie stretches and Richie is amazed by how much of Eddie his mind can conjure up; the mole on his cheek, the dimple he gets when he smiles, the way his hair falls when it’s out of place. He understands that Eddie has to leave. This cannot last forever. There is a great light coming, and maybe it will hurt, and maybe it won’t, but Eddie will not be with him when it passes.

“Will you kiss me before you go?” Richie says.

Eddie kisses him on the corner of his mouth, sweet and gentle. 

“You got like forty fucking years left Trashmouth,” Eddie says, a hand on Richie’s cheek.

“I don’t deserve them,” Richie says. “I’d take one year, if you were there.”

“They don’t do trades. You get what you get. Now, don’t go spending it all in one place.”

Richie laughs again. He kisses Eddie one last time on the forehead before suddenly, he is falling backwards off the cliff, falling down into waters that envelope him not with the enormous rush of force and sound he remembers from the quarry but with a softness and silence that is reminiscent of falling asleep. The last thing he sees before the light outside the water, reflecting off in white shimmers across the ripples of the lake, is Eddie turning from the edge of the cliff and walking out of sight. 

_It’s fine_ , Richie thinks. _He’s not gone. I just can’t see him anymore_.

When he wakes up, the light through the curtains is shining right in his eyes. He notices he has a text message from Danny. He wants to know if Richie wants to go get some dinner. 

You get a silver chip for twenty-four hours sober, a red one for a month, a gold for two months, green for three, purple for four. Richie is holding onto a purple chip that night, but he still likes the silver one best. He has been keeping it in his wallet, but he has mislaid it that day. This upsets him a little, even though he knows it is a simple mass produced token. He could go on Amazon and buy like a hundred of them in bulk, probably. But there was a personal attachment to that one in particular; he had earned it. It was _his_. 

It’s on his mind when he sits next to Danny in AA, holding his purple chip and looking at it with uncertainty. He is proud. He has every right to be proud. 

“Hey, I should have asked you first,” Danny says, voice low, “but I had this stupid idea that I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“What to be a surprise?” Richie says.

Danny holds out his closed fist and when Richie reaches out, Danny drops something in his hand.

It’s a twenty-four hours sober chip, now with a little hole drilled through the top and a keychain attached. Although there is nothing specific to give it away, Richie knows instantly that it is his.

“It was always falling out of your wallet, and you left it behind at the restaurant a couple of days ago, so I thought…” Danny says.

It probably took Danny a few minutes with a drill to put it together, but Richie finds that he is almost on the verge of tears. He throws an arm around Danny’s shoulders and hugs him close, feeling Danny’s hands go around his waist. He likes that. 

“Thank you,” Richie says.

“It’s nothing,” Danny says.

“You know it’s not.”

He meets Danny’s niece. She’s not his _niece_ so much as she’s a girl he’s taken under his wing, but Danny loves her with a ferocity that makes Richie think the lack of shared blood makes no difference whatsoever. Her name is Abra, and she loves magic and cartoons, and she wants Danny to get a dog so _she’ll_ have a dog, a cunning way of getting around her parents not wanting one. Richie thinks the only thing it will take to push Danny over the edge is if Abra actually gets her eyes on a puppy that’s available for adoption. 

She also likes Richie immediately. She is an incredibly bright, confident child and has no issue talking to him with a prenatural intelligence. He thinks that if he’d met her when he was her age she’d have been in the Losers Club so fast, but she’d also have been way too cool for them. 

They go to get ice cream. It’s getting into spring now, not that New Hampshire got the memo. Reminds Richie a little of home, but just different enough that it doesn’t scare him so badly. It’s too cold for ice cream, but they get it anyway, sitting inside the parlour and listening as Abra outlines the plot of the new season of her favourite show, both Danny and Richie being held in rapt attention, though the finer points Abra is trying to make go completely over Richie’s head. He listens intently, and at one point catches Danny watching _him_ instead of Abra, feels something jolt through his body. Danny smiles at him a little and Richie smiles back.

Abra notices. Even if she wasn’t psychic, she would be able to tell. Anyone could tell. She pulls Richie to the side with the kind of earnest seriousness you only see in a child who has nothing but all-encompassing belief in what they’re saying.

“You seem nice, and Danny likes you,” she says. “So, I’m ok with you liking him. You seem like you need someone to be around, too.”

“Thanks,” Richie says. “He’s alright.”

He looks over at where Danny is waiting, leaning on the hood of his car, and feels that same jolt in his chest when their eyes meet and he sees again that Danny is watching him talk to Abra with a great tenderness. 

It hurts to fall in love again, but Richie lets it happen. He doesn’t fight it. He spent a lot of his life fighting against love, and he doesn’t have the strength to fight against it again now, when he is already battling so much else. It is easier to just allow himself to be in love, to fall into it with the ease of falling from a great cliff into soft, warm waters. 

He will wake up every day and see Danny has texted him; sometimes it is a plan, or an invitation, sometimes it is something interesting or funny he saw. But it is always to say _good morning_ , and _I missed you while you were asleep_ . Richie will text back, either to confirm plans, or to fire off a joke in return, but always to say _good morning, I missed you too._

They do not see each other every day, but they think of each other every day. They make time for each other in their days; if they don’t get lunch or dinner together, then they text, or they go for a walk, or they see a movie. When they decide how they want to spend their time they make allowances for the other; if they want to go to the cinema, or go to a party, or visit a new restaurant, they ask each other. When Richie has to go on a long drive to New York to go to Ben and Beverly’s wedding, he brings Danny. When Richie starts writing jokes, he tells them to Danny first, watches the way some of them Danny’s whole body shake with laughter, the deep lines around his eyes when he smiles, the way he holds a hand to his face to hide the laughter.

Richie found himself again, underneath all the pain. He had never gone away.

He gets the six month chip.

“It doesn’t feel like that much, when you have like ten years,” he tells Danny. 

“You’ll get there,” Danny says. “I can wait for you.”

Richie is bad at telling people he loves them, but he went too long without doing it enough. 

“I want to be able to tell my friends I love them,” he tells Danny one day, over coffee.

“You should,” Danny says. “It’s good to let people know how much they mean to you.”

“I do love my friends. They did so much for me. I’d be dead without them. So many times over. And I can never pay them back.”

“You living well and loving them _is_ paying them back.”

“It feels like there should be more I can do.”

Danny shrugs. “I guess just keep living well. And keep telling them you love them.”

“No, no. I want to do some big gesture. What would you do?”

“They’re your friends, Pagliacci. Make a clown pinata for them all to take turns on.”

“Ha ha. Maybe you should be the comedian.”

“I have stage fright,” Danny says.

“You do all those speeches at AA.”

“It’s an easy crowd.”

Richie puts his hand on Danny’s, looking down at the way their fingers link. It is summer now, and the light that they are sitting in is warm and kind on their skin.

“What would you want?” Richie says again.

“I would just want to hear that I’m loved,” Danny says.

“It feels stupid to just say it,” Richie says. “It should be big. It should be huge. There should be a marching band. There should be an orchestra. When it gets said it should be like the whole world coming to a halt and everyone down in the street is shaking in their boots going ‘what was that?!’ because it was so fuckin’ awe-inspiring.”

“If you say it right, that’s what it’ll sound like,” Danny says. 

“What’s the right way to say it?” 

“I’m not sure. You should keep practicing until you figure it out. Keep saying it over and over, and maybe one day you’ll do it right.”

“Huh,” Richie says. “Can I start now?”

“You know I know,” Danny says. “If it’s too much. You don’t have to say anything.”

“There’s two people sitting at this table,” Richie says.

“Ok. Why don’t you try then?” 

It is funny to say _I love you_ to someone for the first time. Richie says:

“Thank you,” which means much the same thing.

And then he says:

“You saved my life,” which means the same again.

And then he says:

“I love you,” which is what he has been saying all along.

“Said it three times in one go,” Danny says.

“Did I do it right?” Richie says.

“Maybe. Maybe do it again, to make sure.”

Danny leans over the table -- and though small towns are full of vicious rumours that can destroy a boy who is seen doing the wrong thing at the wrong time with another boy, and although they are full of people so close who can hurt you so badly who you can be forced to see again and again, Richie isn’t afraid, because this is Danny’s town, and he is not afraid when Danny is there -- and he kisses Richie. Richie kisses him back, kisses him with all the softness and the sweetness he has been holding onto, holding in reserve to spend on someone his entire life, all the gentleness he was never strong enough to use.

Danny hums thoughtfully when they break apart.

“Four times you’ve said it,” he says. 

“I still don’t know if I’m doing it right,” Richie says. 

“Good thing we can just keep saying it forever,” Danny says. “Can I try, this time?”

“Be my guest.”

 _I am Pagliacci_. 

“I love you, Richie.”

Richie hears the marching band, and the orchestra, and the world ceasing to turn. He sits back in his chair and hums thoughtfully.

“It’s a good thing I have another forty years or something to get through so we can keep trying this thing,” Richie says. 

Danny laughs, and it means much the same thing.


End file.
